We automate detection, orchestrate response, and hand more of the SOC to machines every year. The human is still required, and the human is exhausted. Burnout is not a wellness footnote. It is dwell time, alert fatigue, missed signals, and the quiet attrition that walks institutional knowledge out the door. This talk reframes burnout as measurable operational risk, drawing on nearly thirty years in security operations and on validated tools like the Maslach Burnout Inventory. You will leave knowing how to baseline fatigue across a team, catch the warning signs before resignation letters land, and build prevention into on-call, staffing, and incident response. In an AI accelerated world, defending the defenders is how we keep the humans who are still required in the fight.